Rival Events Commemorate Croatian WWII Camp Victims

Croatia’s Jews, Serbs and anti-fascists have again boycotted the state commemoration of victims of the Jasenovac WWII concentration camp over claims that the government tolerates pro-fascist activities.

The Coordination of the Jewish Communities of Croatia is commemorating victims of the WWII concentration camp at Jasenovacon Monday, after boycotts of the state-backed ceremony at the weekend over allegations that the government is tolerating the actions of fascist sympathisers.

Members of Croatia’s Jewish community, which numbers around 2,000 people, will pay their respects at the site of the former camp in central Croatia at a commemoration which coincides with Jom HaShoah, Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The state commemoration was held on Sunday at Jasenovac, attended by Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and other ministers. For the second year in the row, there were no officials’ speeches at the ceremony, only camp inmates’ testimonies, poems and religious ceremonies.

“Together with the ministers… I came to pay my respect to all the victims of this concentration camp, [to] condemn the crimes committed during the Ustasa regime, not only here but at other killing sites, and once again repeat that the goal of modern democratic Croatia is that such crimes aren’t committed ever again,” Plenkovic said after the ceremony.

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, officials from Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska and representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Church also held a commemoration on Saturday in neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, where part of the Jasenovac complex was located.

Vucic said in his speech that there was now an attempt to “resurrect the Ustasa ideology”.

The Serbian National Council, which represents Serbs in Croatia, and the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists held their own commemoration on Saturday, after also boycotting the state commemoration.

Several thousand people attended, compared to the hundreds who joined the state event, including a number of foreign ambassadors, among them the US ambassador to Zagreb, Julieta Valls Noyes.

“We won’t allow ourselves to be overcome by the historical revisionism that has gained deep roots in today’s Croatia, whose ultimate goal is to turn WWII winners [anti-fascist Partisans] into defeated criminals, and those who have been defeated and proven to be criminals [the Ustasa], into national heroes,” the president of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists, Franjo Habulin, told the commemoration.

During the day, a few Croatian Defence Forces war veterans were present in front of the plaque near the Jasenovac camp with their official flag and chanted the controversial slogan “Za dom spremni”.

According to a name-by-name list put together by the Jasenovac Memorial Site, 83,145 people were killed or died at the camp between August 1941 and April 1945.

That number included 47,627 Serbs, 16,173 Roma, 13,116 Jews, 4,225 Croats (as anti-fascists and as real or presumed enemies of the regime) and others.

Around 30,000 out of some 40,000 Jews who lived on Ustasa-held territories before WWII were either killed at Jasenovac or other places in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, or were sent to Nazi death camps, mostly to Auschwitz.